"have ever been"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

caught in passing on the radio on sunday, a woman talking about her
enthusiasm for Star Trek: "I am, and have ever been,..."

this struck me as literary/archaic, and the OED agrees with that
judgment, treating the relevant uses of "ever" -- 'throughout all
time' and 'always' -- as "now arch. or merely literary", with the
most recent cites being from 1831 and 1885, respectively.

googling on <"I am, and have ever been"> pulls up 19 hits, some from
archaizing prose, but a few from more ordinary contexts:

1. Ged Naughton, UK: ”I am and have ever been a fan of Newcastle
United. That’s why sport taught me disappointment.”
www.entwicklung-und-sport.de/ssc_newsl_120606.html

2. I am, and have ever been, a fan of this movie.
www.moviepoopshoot.com/tv/75.html

the remaining hits are mostly of "ever" in the context of a
universal, "all" or "everything":

3. Now all jokes aside..he is just one of those people who make me
feel really shitty about everything i am and have ever been and will
ever be.
hooray-for-being-me.blog.ca/2006/06/

4. All that I am and have ever been the river has known. It is the
map I follow back to understand what has shaped me: ...
www.class.uidaho.edu/english/Banks/alycia_shedd.htm

here "all" is not itself universalizing; rather it conveys something
like 'at some time', the meaning "ever" has in negative,
interrogative, comparative, and superlative contexts.

googling on the alternative order <"I am, and ever have been"> gets
29 hits, all except one from before the 20th century, or in
archaizing fiction, or in the context of a universal.  but this one
looks good:

5. I am, and ever have been an avid supporter of the separation of
church and state, no matter what religion.
www.atsnn.com/story/199566.html

<"I am, and will ever be"> gets more good hits.  the usage isn't easy
to search for, in any case.

possibly those who use "ever" 'always' (the radio speaker and the
writers of 1, 2, and 5) see it as more formal and emphatic than
"always".  here's a quote where that motive seems pretty clear; the
writer reformulates a clause, replacing "always" with "ever", to make
it more emphatic:

6. As a Singaporean I have been told that I am and will always be,
regardless of the rhetoric, that I am and will ever be a second-class
citizen.
www.yawningbread.org/apdx_2004/imp-167.htm

or maybe some people are just treating "ever" as a shorter variant of
"forever".

or, of course, it could be a survival of the old universalizing
"ever", perhaps only in a few phrases.  (is there a well-known
quotation that might have served as the model?)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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